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Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald - Book Review

Reading Elijah Wald's Dylan
Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan & the Night that Split the
Sixties (Dey Street/Harper-Collins Publishers, 2015, 368
Pages, $28.99/13.00) reproduces in wonderful, eye-opening detail the
environment of the Newport Folk Festival during July of 1965 when Bob
Dylan appeared on stage on Sunday evening fronting an electric band,
sang three rock songs, and the world changed. To place the momentous
events of Newport into the social and political climate of the times,
Wald provides extensive mini-biographies of Pete Seeger, the guru of
folk music and the old left in America, and Bob Dylan, the voice of
an emerging youth culture and rock generation that continues to this
day. For fifty years, rumors and myths have swirled around that
evening about what Dylan intended and how Seeger reacted to the
situation. In this carefully researched and extensively annotated
account, Wald weaves an exciting and involving story about clashing
cultures and long term outcomes. For students of folk music, rock
music, and the emergence of Americana, this book is must reading.

Pete Seeger, by the time the Newport
Folk Festival rolled around in 1965 was the leading light in the
midst of a great folk revival that had been growing for years,
centered in Greenwich Village in New York City. His career, in which
he had traveled throughout the country supporting radical causes,
unions, and civil rights had focused on finding wonderful local folk
performers and bringing them to New York and to Newport to perform.
During the sixties, Newport was featuring groups like Peter, Paul and
Mary, individuals like Joan Baez, Jean Ritchie and southern gospel
groups like the Staples Singers, as well as African dancers. Seeger
emphasized the singing, playing, and sharing of folk music as a way
to build community and discover connections. There were four major
strains in folk music, identified by Wald. Community music making was
encouraged, as young people played, sang, and danced together, often
at summer camps and festivals. The preservation of songs and styles
associated with particular regional or ethnic traditions. As such,
rural black blues singers and gospel groups, as well as white rural
mountain fiddlers and dance callers, or singing preachers were all a
part of this movement. Peoples' music was to be celebrated in
performance and introduced to those who might otherwise not hear it.
Finally, there was the growth of a professional performance scene,
represented by people like Josh White, Peter, Paul & Mary, and
Seeger himself, whose enormous skills before large audiences brought
comfortable middle-class people together to hear and sing about his
radical causes. Not all of these strands were fully compatible.

Dylan emerges from the myths and
legends of who he is and what he stands for as an intensely private
person determined not to be pigeon-holed or stereotyped into a
particular role or image while always seeking to express himself
through his distinctive poetry and style. By 1965, Dylan was no
longer Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota, but his legend wasn't
yet fully formed either. He had tried to create a new self through
what can only have been lies he told about himself, yet his musical
wanderings brought him to Greenwich Village in 1961 when The Village
was a boiling pot of poets, writers, singers, songwriters, beatniks,
and political radicals sharing their music and ideas. It had been
such for decades. Dylan, awkward and unformed, always something of a
loner, fit in and thrived in this environment, hanging out and
performing in the small folk,blues, and jazz clubs and bars that
proliferated there. He honed his skills in front of growing
audiences, releasing his first introductory self-titled album in 1962
and by his first performance at Newport in1963, as a guest of Joan
Baez, had four albums out. He was writing and singing folk and
protest songs which were bringing him acclaim and leaving him
uncomfortable as he worked to forge a new musical and personal self.
His transition from folk singer to rocker was becoming inevitable,
and the Newport Folk Festival scheduled for July 1965 was the venue
to unveil it all.

The Newport Folk Festival had been
established in 1959 as an offshoot of the already established Newport
Jazz Festival. It quickly became a showplace for introducing folk
performers from around the world as well as emerging recording
artists. The design of singalongs, workshops, and concerts reflected
Seeger's priorities and, in many ways, established a pattern for
succeeding festivals. By 1965 it was attracting a youthful audience
which had experienced the assassination of John F. Kennedy and was
becoming embroiled in the war in Vietnam. The Beatles and The Rolling
Stones had both appeared in America and the British Invasion was well
underway. In the chapters detailing the events of 1965 at Newport,
Wald carefully dissects myth and legend from what he can verify. He
carefully notes that the memories of those involved have changed over
time. Even Pete Seeger had included elements in his memory that may
or may not ever have happened. Films of the time have been clipped
and re-arranged to create the environment the film-maker wishes to
promote. By reviewing every piece of film, each newspaper review and
account, by interviewing all the principals still available, and
carefully stitching together the events of Dylan's appearance on
stage with a Stratocaster in hand and backed by members of the
Chicago-based Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Wald provides what must
become the definitive version of this event that he describes as the
moment that split the world. Seeger was the past, Dylan the future.

Elijah Wald

Elijah Wald has been a musician since age seven and a writer since
the early 1980s. He has published more than a thousand articles,
mostly about folk, roots and international music for various
magazines and newspapers, including over ten years as "world
music" writer for the Boston Globe. In the current
millenium, he has been devoting most of his time to book projects,
including volumes on such disparate subjects as Delta blues (Escaping
the Delta), Mexican drug ballads (Narcocorrido), hitchhiking (Riding
with Strangers), and a broad social history of American popular music
(How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll). (from Wald's web
site)

Dylan
Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan & the Night that Split the
Sixties(Dey
Street/Harper-Collins Publishers, 2015, 368 Pages, $28.99/13.00) by
Elijah Wald captures a central era and moment in the development of
the America we live in now as he develops the idea of moving from a
period of relative comfort, peace, and middle-class self-asssurance
towards a youth oriented culture roiling with rebellion and
discontent. The book is extensively annotated. Wald recreates a world
I was peripherally on the edge of. I saw Pete Seeger live in concert
in Houston Hall at the University of Pennsylvania in the early
sixties, Josh White at the same place. The early sea chanty recording
of the Almanac Singers was in my home's record library. The Kingston
Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Oscar Brand were part of my musical
education. I only saw Dylan a couple of times, both in this century,
so, for me, this extremely useful volume puts a period into
perspective. Its detail and exhaustive research is combined with a
writing style making it both persuasive and highly readable. I
supplemented my reading by listening extensively to Dylan's recorded
work up to 1965 on Spotify.
I read Dylan
Goes Electric as an
electronic galley provided by the publisher through Edelweiss
on my Kindle
App.

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About Me

With my wife Irene, I travel about 200 days a year to bluegrass events. On the road we live in a 26 foot travel trailer with out cat, Callie, our computers, books, and each other. I publish a blog called Ted Lehmann's Books, Bluegrass and Brainstorms and we maintain a YouTube channel which displays our own videos of bluegrass performances. It has been a surprising journey, which we began in earnest after my retirement. Join us we continue on it.

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You can see the full collection of videos I've posted by going to my You Tube Channel. Most videos are now being recorded by Irene.